They stopped again in an open-plan area, a meeting place of several corridors, painted green, with police information posters on the walls. There was an office with a window that had been wired off and in front of it a table with a computer and two chairs. They went in. The handcuffs were unlocked and he brought his arms forward with a sense of relief. His shoulders were aching.
“Sit down,” one of the policemen said.
Matt did as he was told.
About five minutes passed. Then a door opened and a man in a suit and a brightly coloured open-neck shirt appeared. He was black, with a slim figure and kind, intelligent eyes. He looked a bit more friendly than the others and he was also younger. Matt didn’t think he could be out of his twenties.
“My name is Detective Superintendent Mallory,” he said. He had a pleasant, cultivated voice. Like a newsreader on TV. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” Matt was surprised by the question.
Mallory had sat down opposite him at the table. He pressed a few keys on the computer. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Matt.”
Mallory’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me your full name. I need it for the report.”
Matt hesitated. But he knew he had to co-operate. “Matthew Freeman,” he said.
The detective tapped in the letters and pressed ENTER, then watched as a dozen lines of information scrolled up on the screen. “You seem to have made quite a name for yourself,” Mallory said. “You live at 27 Eastfield Terrace?”
“Yes.” Matt nodded.
“With a guardian. A Ms Davis?”
“She’s my aunt.”
“You’re fourteen.”
“Yes.”
Mallory looked up from the computer screen. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.
Matt took a breath. “I know.” He was almost afraid to ask, but he still had to know. “Is he dead?”
“The guard you stabbed has a name – Mark Adams. He’s married with two kids.” Mallory couldn’t conceal his anger. “Right now he’s in hospital. He’s going to be there for a while. But he won’t die.”
“I didn’t stab him,” Matt said. “I didn’t know anyone was going to get hurt. That wasn’t the idea.”
“That’s not what your friend Kelvin told us. He said it was your knife and your plan, and it was you who panicked when you were caught.”
“He’s lying.”
Mallory sighed. “I know. I’ve already spoken to the guard and he’s told us what happened. He heard the two of you argue and he knows that you wanted to stay. But you’re still responsible, Matthew. I have to tell you that you’re going to be charged as an accessory. Do you know what that means?”
“Are you going to send me to prison?”
“You’re fourteen. You’re too young for prison. But it’s quite possible you could be facing a custodial sentence.” Mallory stopped. He had seen dozens of kids in this room. Many of them had been thugs, ranging from openly defiant to snivelling and pathetic. But he was puzzled by the quiet, good-looking boy who sat opposite him now. Matt was somehow different and Mallory found himself wondering what had brought him here. “Look, it’s too late to talk about this now,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
Matt shook his head.
“Is there anything you need?”
“No.”
“Try not to be too scared. We’ll look after you tonight, and tomorrow morning we’ll try to make sense of all this. Right now, you’d better get out of those clothes. I’m afraid someone will have to stay with you while you undress – your clothes are evidence. You can have a shower, and then a doctor will look at you.”
“I’m not sick. I don’t need a doctor.”
“It’s just routine. He’ll give you a quick examination and maybe something to help you sleep.” Mallory glanced at one of the policemen. “All right.”
Matt stood up. “Will you tell him I’m sorry,” he said. “The security guard. Mark Adams. I know it doesn’t make any difference and you probably don’t believe me anyway. But I am.”
Mallory nodded. The policeman took Matt’s arm and led him back down the corridor.
He was taken to a changing room – bare wooden benches and white tiles. His clothes went into a plastic bag that was stapled shut and labelled. Then he showered. He had no privacy, just as he had been warned. There was a policeman in the room with him the whole time but he still managed to enjoy the shower; the rush of water, scalding hot, shuddering down on his head and his shoulders, washing away the blood and the horror of the last hours. It was over all too quickly. He dried himself, then pulled on a grey T-shirt and undershorts that had been laundered and pressed as flat as paper. Finally, he was taken to a room which could have been a ward in a hospital, with four metal beds, four identical tables, and nothing else. The room felt as if it had been cleaned fifty times. Even the air felt clean. It seemed that he was the only occupant.
He climbed into bed, and before any doctor could arrive he was asleep. Sleep came as quickly as a train in a tunnel. He simply lay back and kept on falling.
Meanwhile, in a room downstairs, Stephen Mallory was sitting opposite a crumpled, sullen-looking woman who was managing both to scowl and to yawn at the same time. The woman was Gwenda Davis, Matt’s aunt and legal guardian. She was short and drab, with mousey hair and a pinched, forgettable face. She wore no make-up and there were heavy bags under her eyes. She was dressed in an old, shapeless coat. It might have been expensive once but now it was frayed at the edges. Like the woman who was wearing it, Mallory thought. He supposed that she was about forty-five. She seemed nervous, as if it was she, not her nephew, who had been accused of something.
“So where is he?” Gwenda asked. She had a thin, whiny voice that made every question sound like a complaint.
“He’s upstairs,” Mallory said. “He fell asleep before the doctor could see him but we gave him a tranquillizer anyway. It’s possible he’s in shock.”
“ He’s in shock?” Gwenda laughed briefly. “ I’m the one who’s in shock, I can tell you. Getting a call in the middle of the night like this! Having to come down here. I’m a respectable person. All this business with knives and burglary. I’ve never heard such a thing.”
“I understand you share your house with a partner?”
“Brian.” Gwenda noticed Mallory had taken out a pen. “Brian Conran,” she continued, and watched as the detective wrote it down. “He’s in bed. He’s not any relation to the boy. Why should he come out in the middle of the night? He’s got to be up first thing in the morning.”
“What’s his job?”
“What’s it to you?” She shrugged. “He’s a milkman.”
Mallory pulled a sheet of paper out of a file. “I see from Matthew’s record that his parents died,” he said.
“A car crash.” Gwenda swallowed. “He was eight years old. The family was living in London then. His mother and father were killed. But he’d stayed behind.”
“He was an only child?”
“No brothers or sisters. No relatives either. Nobody knew what to do with him.”
“You were related to his mother?”
“I was her half-sister. I’d only met them a few times.” Gwenda drew herself up, crossing her hands in front of her. “If you want the truth, they were never very friendly. It was all right for them, wasn’t it. A nice house in a nice neighbourhood. A nice car. Nice everything. They didn’t have any time for me. And when they died in that stupid accident… Well, I don’t know what would have happened to Matthew if it hadn’t been for me and Brian. We took him in. We had to bring him up all on our own. And what did we get for it? Nothing but trouble!”
Mallory glanced again at the report. “He had never been in trouble before,” he said. “He started missing school a year after he came to Ipswich. From there it was downhill all the way.”
“Are you blaming me?” Two pinpricks of red had appeared i
n Gwenda’s cheeks. “It was nothing to do with me! It was that boy, Kelvin Johnson… He lives just down the road. He’s to blame!”
It was eleven o’clock at night. It had been a long day and Mallory had heard enough. He closed the file and stood up. “Thank you for coming in, Ms Davis,” he said. “Would you like to see Matthew?”
“There’s hardly any point seeing him if he’s asleep, is there?”
“Maybe you’d like to come back in the morning then. The social services will be here. He’ll also need legal representation. But if you’re here at nine o’clock-”
“I can’t come at nine o’clock. I have to make Brian his breakfast when he gets in from his rounds. I’ll come in after that.”
“Right.”
Gwenda Davis picked herself up and left the room. Mallory watched her go. He felt nothing for her. But he couldn’t avoid a sense of great sadness for the boy who was asleep upstairs.
***
Matt woke up.
The room with the four metal beds was deserted. No sound came from anywhere in the building. He could feel a pillow cradling the back of his head and he wondered how long he had been here. There was no sign of a clock, but it was pitch-dark outside – he could see the night sky through the barred window. The room was softly lit. They probably never turned off the lights completely.
He tried to go back to sleep but he was wide awake. Suddenly he was seeing it all again, the events of the evening. The images flickered in front of him like cards caught in the wind. There was Kelvin, outside the railway station. Then the warehouse, the DVDs, the guard, the knife, Kelvin again with that stupid smile, the police cars, and his own hands, stained with blood. Matt squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the memories out of his mind.
It was very warm in the room. The window was shut and the radiators were on. He could feel the heat shimmering around him. He was suddenly thirsty and looked around, wondering if he could call someone. But there was no bell to press and nobody in sight.
Then he noticed a jug of water and a tumbler on a table at the other side of the room. All he had to do was get out of bed and help himself. He lifted a hand to move the bedcovers but they were too heavy. No. That wasn’t possible. He flexed his muscles and tried to lift himself. He could hardly move. And then he realized that a doctor must have seen him while he was asleep. He had been injected with something – tranquillized. He couldn’t move.
He almost cried out. He felt the panic suffocating him. What were they going to do to him? Why had he gone to the warehouse? How had he allowed all this to happen? He sank back into the pillow, fighting the wave of despair that had risen over him. He couldn’t believe that a man had almost died for the sake of a handful of DVDs. How could he have been stupid enough to think of Kelvin as a friend? “He did it! He did it!” Kelvin was pathetic. He always had been.
The water…
The room seemed to be getting hotter and hotter, as if the police had turned up the radiators just to torment him. Matt found his whole concentration focused on the jug. He could see the perfect circle made by the water where it touched the edge of the glass. He willed himself to get up, and when that failed, he found himself willing the jug of water to come to him. He ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was parched. For a moment, he thought he smelled something burning. The jug was so close to him – only a few metres away. He reached out to it, pulling it towards him with his mind.
The jug smashed.
It seemed to explode, almost in slow motion. For a split second the water hung in the air, its tentacles sprawling outwards. Then it splashed down on to the table, on to the pieces of glass.
Matt was stunned. He had no idea what had happened. He hadn’t broken the jug. It had broken itself. It was as if it had been hit by a bullet. Yet he hadn’t heard a shot. He hadn’t heard anything. Matt stared at the glass fragments, scattered over the table with the water pooling around, dripping on to the floor. Had the heat in the room caused it? Or was it him? Had his thirst somehow, in some inexplicable way, smashed the jug?
Exhaustion finally overcame him a second time and he fell into a deep, suffocating sleep. When he woke up the next morning, the broken glass wasn’t there. Nor was the spilled water. A single jug and a tumbler stood on the table, exactly where they had been the night before, and Matt decided that the whole experience must have been nothing more than a weird dream.
THE LEAF PROJECT
Matt, dressed in his own clothes, sat in a chair facing the four people who were examining him from the other side of a long wooden table. It was the sort of room where people got married… or perhaps divorced. Not uncomfortable, but spare and formal with wood panelling on the walls and portraits of officials – probably all dead by now – in gold frames. He was in London, although he wasn’t exactly sure where. It had been raining too hard to see much out of the car windows, and he had been driven straight to the door and shown up a flight of stairs into this modern, unattractive building. There had been no time for sightseeing.
A week had passed since Matt’s arrest, and in that time he had been interviewed, examined, assessed and, for many hours, left on his own. He had filled in papers that were like exams except that they didn’t seem to have any point. “2, 8, 14, 20… What is the next number in the sequence?” And: “How many spelling misteaks are their in this sentence?” Different men and women – doctors, psychologists – had asked him to talk about himself. He had been shown blobs on pieces of paper. “What do you see, Matthew? What does the shape make you think about?” And there had been games – word association, stuff like that.
Finally they had told him he was leaving. A suitcase had appeared, packed with clothes that Gwenda must have sent from home. After a three-hour journey in an ordinary car – not even a police car – he had found himself here. The rain was still lashing against the windows, obscuring the view. He could hear it hammering against the glass, as if demanding to be let in. It seemed that the whole outside world had dissolved and the only things remaining were the five people, here, in this room.
On the far left was his aunt, Gwenda Davis. She was dabbing at her eyes with a paper tissue, causing her mascara to smudge – there was a dirty brown streak all the way down one side of her face. Detective Superintendent Stephen Mallory sat next to her, looking the other way. The third person was a woman magistrate. Matt had only met her for the first time today. She was about sixty years old, smartly dressed and a little severe-looking. She wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a look of disapproval that had, over the years, become permanent. The fourth person was Matt’s social worker, an untidy, grey-haired woman about ten years younger than the magistrate. Her name was Jill Hughes and she had been assigned to Matt when he was eleven. She had worked with him ever since and privately thought of him as her greatest failure.
It was the magistrate who was talking.
“Matthew, you have to understand that this was a very cowardly crime and one that involved violence,” she was saying. The magistrate had a very precise, clipped manner of speaking, as if every word was of the utmost importance. “Your associate, Kelvin Johnson, will be sent to the Crown Court and he will almost certainly be sentenced to imprisonment in a young offenders’ institution. He is seventeen. You, of course, are younger. But even so, you are above the age of criminal responsibility. If you went before the court, I suspect you might well be given a Section 91. This means you would be locked up for perhaps three years in either a secure training centre or a local authority secure children’s home.”
She paused and opened a file that was on the table in front of her. The sound of the pages turning seemed very loud in the sudden silence.
“You are an intelligent boy,” she went on. “I have the results of the tests you have been given during the past week. Although your school results have never done you any credit, you seem to have a good grasp of the basic skills – maths and literacy. Your psychological report suggests that you have a positive and a creative mind. It seems very strang
e that you should have chosen to drift into truancy and petty crime.
“But then, of course, we have to take into account your unfortunate background. You lost your parents suddenly and at a very early age – and this must have caused you enormous distress. I think it’s fairly clear to all of us that the problems in your young life may have resulted from this one, tragic event. Even so, Matthew, you must find the strength to overcome these problems. If you continue down the path you have been following, there is a very real chance that you will end up in prison.”
Matt wasn’t really listening. He was trying to, but the words sounded distant and irrelevant… like an announcer in a station where he didn’t want to catch a train. He couldn’t believe that this woman was talking to him. Instead, he listened to the rain, beating against the windows. The rain seemed to tell him more.
“There is a new government programme that has been designed specifically for people like you,” the magistrate went on. “The truth is, Matthew, that nobody wants to see young people sent into care. It’s expensive – and anyway, we don’t have enough places. That is why the government recently created the LEAF Project. Liberty and Education Achieved through Fostering. You can think of it, if you like, as turning over a new leaf.”
“I’ve already been fostered once” – Matt glanced at Gwenda, who twitched in her seat – “and it wasn’t exactly a success.”
“That’s certainly true,” the magistrate agreed. “And I’m afraid Ms Davis no longer feels able to look after you. She’s had enough.”
“Really?” Matt said scornfully.
“I did what I could!” Gwenda cried. She twisted the tissue into her eye. “You were never grateful. You were never nice. You never even tried.”
The magistrate coughed and Gwenda glanced up briefly then fell silent. “And I’m afraid your social worker, Miss Hughes, feels much the same,” she went on. “I have to tell you, Matthew, that you’ve left us with no other alternative. LEAF is your last chance to redeem yourself.”
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